Evolving news on the science, writing and thinking about Near Death Experiences (NDEs)

Birmingham is NDE central

Once again, thanks to Peter for sending me the link to this article. Very interesting that one hospital, Heartlands, in Birmingham UK, has so far managed to recruit 16 patients. Considering that the study is looking to recruit 1000-1500 overall, 16 is pretty good for one site. This is possibly why they received a visit from the man himself, Dr Sam Parnia, who congratulated them on their contribution.

Given there are 10 sites involved in this study, then I am hopeful that recruitment would be nearing the 10-20% mark at least, still a long way short of the total needed, but a good start nonetheless. This gives us hope that there will be a “scientific” verification of an OBE before long, provided of course that the subjects enrolled were all “proper” subjects…ie. they survived to be interviewed and the LCD screens were in place for at least part of the resuscitation attempt.

As always we wish Dr Parnia and the AWARE II research team all the very best of luck in their ongoing work.

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2 thoughts on “Birmingham is NDE central”

According to the summary of the study,
“It is possible that patients who are able to recount these experiences may have better patient outcomes in terms of reduced brain damage, improved functional ability and better psychological adjustment to the event. We think that these patients may have had better blood flow to the brain during cardiac arrest, leading to consciousness and activity of the mind.”
If they are right,the use of brain oxygen monitoring devices and exclusion of patient who suffered from the brain damage may increased the incidence of NDE.
I hope they are doing right thing,and the data may better than first study.

I think the fact that patients have to survive long enough to be interviewed in the first place is a marked improvement on the first study! Yes, it would also help if they have preserved sufficient brain function to recall any memories of any experiences that occurred during the period they were dead.

From a healthcare/resuscitation science perspective, I think these measurements may be very useful in determining how to improve outcomes. However, the cynical side of me wonders how much of this is included to insure that the protocol has enough valid scientific merit to insure it passes ethics review boards and doesn’t get labelled as nutter science. Of most interest to us “nutters” is not whether better brain oxygenation results in higher chance of NDE [recollection], but whether or not we get a validated OBE. Reducing the chance of including people who can’t remember anything in the first place because they have brain damage will certainly improve those chances.

I promised I would address this particular publication in a new post, as it has got lost in a long and winding discussion that came out of the last post. Here is the link to the full text of the publication which was published in August this year: Link to PDF of paper on Researchgate […]

Thanks to one of the regular contributors for this reminder, but Dr Parnia tweeted for the first time in a very long time: I use the word illusive since he doesn’t really clarify what this means. Is this AWARE II, surely not as that is well under way now. Are these sub-studies of AWARE II? […]

Apologies for the long gap between posts, but I am still working on a new book that I will be publishing later this year. Anyway, this article really caught my attention: Science and the Soul “But I was wrong. Katie made me face my misunderstanding. She was a whole person. The child in my office […]

I came across this in my googling of NDE research, and I think it may have been mentioned in a previous chat (sorry for not calling out the person who mentioned it). Click on the link to access the pdf. It is free to download. Meditation-Induced Near-Death Experiences: a 3-Year Longitudinal Study William Van […]

Thanks to Samwise for posting this in the comments section of the last post. Again, I felt this was worth creating a seperate post out of since it is news about the AWARE study, and the last post was nearing a hundred comments, so time to move on. The link below is for a new […]

I am in the process of working on a review of the literature on evidence against NDEs being a genuine out of body phenomenon. The key piece of evidence relates to reports of brain activity after the heart has stopped. There have been reports in rats up to 30 seconds after death, and also in […]

Thanks to Eduardo for picking this one up. I am extremely busy at the moment so don’t always have the time to trawl the networks for anything Parnia or NDE related, so appreciate when others email me links or post them in discussions. I felt this was worth pulling out. It was aired earlier this […]

“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.” John 1:9 I usually avoid referencing my faith as I want this blog to focus objectively on the research around NDEs. However, in an era where I see my fellow Christians being persecuted on an ever larger scale, and the establishment doing its best […]

I finally received a response from Dr Parnia today to my questions. As I said previously, many of the questions had been answered in the various twitter posts he had created, specifically about numbers recruited so far, and timelines. There was a little more detail about the latter in the email. The announcement next year […]

Thanks Z for alerting me to Dr. Parnia’s new tweets (he tweets so rarely that I don’t check as often as I should). Some of my regular contributors in the comments section did caution me about getting excited and it turns out they were dead right. I sent an email to Dr Parnia asking him […]